There is increasing use of high-speed serial data communication for exchange of data between the devices that make up various types of systems. As the speed of such communication links continue to increase, it is increasingly difficult in the link design process to provide for accurate design simulation and validation and also to provide accurate performance and margin estimations over process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations. It also becomes problematic to provide for accurate diagnostic and debugging capabilities such that work-around solutions may be quickly found over PVT variations.